Coli Of The Beef Business - 1576 Words

E. coli’s Presence in the Beef Business; what has got to Change? America is hungry, and someone has got to keep us fed. We live in a country with the luxury of convenience, so naturally hamburgers are as â€Å"American as apple pie†. With the ease of picking them up at a drive-thru window, the ability to munch them one-handed, and the extreme affordability are all factors that put them on most people’s favorite food list. Unfortunately for the burger lovers out there, these lunchtime staples could also harboring a hidden danger; a potentially deadly food borne pathogen named Escherichia coli that’s been making headlines more frequently as of late. Escherichia coli, or E. coli for short, are most commonly found in ground beef. It is naturally†¦show more content†¦coli in every single step of the beef production business is why we need to take this problem very seriously. There are too many areas in which things can go wrong in the process of raisin g, slaughtering, and packaging beef for human consumption. Especially highest is the danger in slaughterhouses and processing plants, as there are many potential contamination hazards, and most depend on human attention to catch, correct, and prevent. The cattle may arrive at the slaughterhouse with feces on their hides, which present the first risk of contamination as it can be very difficult to remove the hides from the animal without transferring any of the pathogen bearing feces to the carcass.(CITE) The second high-risk area in the slaughterhouse is the gutting station, where at some locations, workers are expected to keep up an extremely fast pace, as many as sixty cattle per hour, which does not provide adequate time to prevent accidents. (CITE) A ruptured gut sac can leave a carcass intended for human consumption covered in fecal matter or stomach acids all potentially containing the potentially deadly foodborne bacteria. While there are steps taken to clean and disinfect t he carcasses after these processes are carried out, E. coli is hard to kill. It has shown resistance to heat, cold, acids and XXXX (Cite). A simple adjustment, like reducing the number of carcasses a worker is responsible for eviscerating in an hour, is an example of a small, easy way to bring down the